Faux Feminism

In the last two weeks, a couple of prominent women inadvertently revealed the insufferably presumptive arrogance that forms the heart of progressive ideology.

“Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their [sic] own voice,” declared former First Lady Michelle Obama last Wednesday during a conversation with author Roxane Gay at the Inbound conference in Boston.

Mrs. Obama kept digging, insisting the 41% of women who voted for Donald Trump weren’t aware enough to think for themselves. “It doesn’t say as much about Hillary, and everybody’s trying to worry about what it means for Hillary and no, no, no, what does this mean for us, as women?” she asked. “That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, ‘He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.’ To me that just says, you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like.”

Got that? If you’re a woman who didn’t vote for Hillary it wasn’t about the possibility that she’s eminently unlikeable, is a congenital liar, possesses a gargantuan sense of self-entitlement, or is an un-convicted felon who likely compromised national security. It’s all about the inability to like oneself enough — or be smart enough — to transcend such “petty” concerns.

Perhaps Michelle was inspired by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who weighed in with an equally “astute” analysis of the 2016 election. On Tuesday, in an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS News, Ginsburg stated that she had “no doubt” sexism played a role in the 2016 election. “There’s so many things that might have been decisive but that was a major, major factor,” she insisted.

Again, some of those other things that “might have been decisive” could include Hillary’s consistent incompetence as secretary of state, her penchant for running the Clinton Foundation as a de facto pay-to-play enterprise, calling half the nation “deplorables,” or even the idea that she abided the Democratic National Committee’s effort, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders.

Or maybe a lot of “sexists” decided that eight years of sub-par economic growth, worsening race relations, innumerable foreign policy debacles, unfettered illegal immigration, or the ongoing effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into a nation of tribalist sub-groups competing for most-aggrieved status didn’t merit the “third Obama term” for which the Leftmedia shamelessly shilled during the 2016 election campaign.

One might think Ginsburg would know better than to insert herself into partisan politics — again. During the 2016 campaign, she abandoned any pretense of the impartiality that ostensibly attends her position on the Court. “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” she opined to The New York Times last July. “For the country, it could be four years. For the Court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

We wonder what Justice Neil Gorsuch thinks about her comment.

Four days later, Ginsburg dug herself a deeper hole in a CNN interview, calling Trump a “faker.” “He has no consistency about him,” she said. “He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. … How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”

After she was hammered, not just by Trump, but by the far-left New York Times and Washington Post newspapers, Ginsburg apologized. “On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them,” Ginsburg said in a statement. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”

Apparently circumspection isn’t Ginsburg’s strong suit. Like the former president’s wife, she demonstrates a similar level of prejudice, hypocrisy and political tone-deafness that sweeping generalizations inevitably engender. Moreover, her “apology” rings exceedingly hollow.

Townhall’s Katie Pavlich takes Mrs. Obama to task. “Did women who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democrat primary ‘vote against their voice’ because they voted against the female candidate?” she asks. “Did Michelle Obama vote against her voice for voting for a man, her husband, instead of Hillary?” Pavlich reminds us that would be the same Michelle Obama who “argued Clinton was unqualified to sit in the Oval Office” during the 2008 campaign.

Ginsburg was equally hypocritical, never mentioning “sexism” when Barack Obama denied Clinton her chance to become the first female president. Nor did she wear a collar she is known to put on her robe indicating her intention to dissent against certain Supreme Court rulings — the same collar she wore the day after Trump’s election, even though no opinions were scheduled to be given.

Yet perhaps sexism and mindlessness were factors in the 2016 election. “Me, I intend to vote with my vagina,” declared Dame magazine columnist Kate Harding in April 2015. “Unapologetically. Enthusiastically.”

Part of Harding’s “rationale”? “There has never been a president who knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, or give birth,” she writes. “There has never been a president who knows what it’s like to be the target of subtle and categorically unsubtle sexism.”

Harding milked her blood images. “American women have been bleeding for over 200 years while men tell us it’s no big deal, and a lot of us have arrived at the point where we just want someone with a visceral, not abstract, concept of what that means.”

What about Hillary herself? “Ms. Clinton played down the role of gender the first time she ran for the top job, but this time it’s expected to be a core plank of her campaign,” reported NewsHub in 2015.

Fast forward to earlier this month, when Clinton joined Obama and Ginsburg in their effort to denigrate non-progressive women. In an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Clinton tied former FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was re-opening the (non)investigation into her emails to the idea that men could turn to their wives or girlfriends and say, “I told you, she’s going to be in jail,” Clinton asserted. “You don’t wanna waste your vote.” Clinton further asserted that women voters who might have been on the fence ultimately decided not to vote for her. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m taking a chance, I’m going to vote,’ it didn’t work,” Clinton added.

In an interview with NPR she singled out white women she believed were “under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’”

For decades, progressives have asserted feminism is all about empowering strong, independent women who are unafraid to think for themselves. Yet as Obama and Clinton make abundantly clear, if a woman’s independent thinking doesn’t align itself with progressive ideology, she is nothing more than a self-hating, go-along-to-get-along lackey subservient to a man. Ginsburg is equally obtuse, but if one assumes her assertion applies to both sexes, then women are lackeys and men are misogynists, much like anyone who failed to vote for Barack Obama — or merely disagreed with him in many cases — was “racist.”

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